Rembrandt turned Abraham into a Dutch gentleman welcoming three men into his home. We, too, can imagine Abraham's hospitality in our own day.

This is the sermon I delivered tonight at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island.

We have designated this Shabbat as an evening for greeting new members of Temple Sinai. Tonight, even more than on most nights, we want to show that we are a congregation that extends the same warm hospitality to the newcomer that we use to greet an old friend. Tonight, we want to say as a community that we are so grateful for the participation and fellowship of all who walk into our doors.

There is actually a strong connection between the idea of hospitality and this week’s Torah portion. Believe me, I didn’t plan it that way, but I sure am going to take advantage of it in my talk tonight.

In this week’s Torah portion (Vayera) we have two extraordinary stories of hospitality. The first is a story about Abraham, who saw three strange men walk past his tent on a hot day. Abraham was so consumed by the desire and need to show hospitality that he ran out to urge the men into his home. He showed an enthusiasm for hospitality that would have been surprising even in his day.

The Torah tells us that Abraham said to the men, “My lords, if it please you, do not go on past your servant. Let water be brought; bathe your feet and recline under the tree. Let me fetch some bread that you may refresh yourselves.”

Needless to to say, this is not the way we imagine that strangers would be treated today. Can you imagine three strange men walking through the streets of Cranston and being invited into people’s homes to share a meal and to lie down on the sofa? Maybe chips and a beer to watch the Patriots game? Abraham represents the epitome and the ideal model for hospitality.

The men did come into Abraham’s tent. They ate, they drank, and they reclined. Because this is a biblical story, the three men turned out to be three angels and they gave Abraham important news about his future and God’s plans for him. Moral of the story: It pays to be a good host and to treat everyone, especially a stranger, as an honored guest.

The second story about hospitality in this week’s Torah portion does not have an ending that is nearly as happy as the first. Two of the same three men/angels who visited Abraham went next to visit Abraham’s nephew Lot, who lived in the city of S’dom. The story begins in a way that is similar to the first story:

“The two angels arrived in S’dom in the evening, as Lot was sitting at the city gates. When Lot saw them, he rose to greet them and, bowing low with his face to the ground, he said, ‘Please, my lords, come to your servant’s house. Spend the night and bathe your feet.’”

The Torah seems to go out of its way to show that Abraham and Lot treated their guests in similar fashion. But in the second story, things took an ugly turn.

The Torah tells us that the angel/men “had not yet lain down, when the townspeople, the men of S’dom, young and old – all the people, down to the last man – gathered around the house. They shouted to Lot and said to him, ‘Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us, that we may know them.’”

I probably don’t need to tell you that the folks of Sodom we’re not asking for a formal introduction. They wanted to “know” Lot’s guests in the biblical sense – that is, they wanted to rape them.

Lot refused to turn over his guests, and things just got worse. Lot offered to give the townspeople his two virgin daughters instead of the guests, but the people refused. The people of S’dom were furious with Lot, an outsider who had only recently moved to their city. They said about him, “This fellow came here as a foreigner, and he already acts like he’s the king!” They shouted at Lot, “We will be worse with you than with your guests.”

The two angels protected Lot by striking the people with blindness. (It’s good to be a divine being). The angels, Lot, and his family made their escape from the city.

What is the difference in these two stories about hospitality? Both Abraham and Lot treated their guests with a high standard of hospitality. In one instance, everything went well. In the other instance, everything went horribly wrong. What made the difference?

In the commentaries of the rabbis, much is made of the fact that Abraham offered food and Lot did not, but that is a distinction in their personalities. It did not seem to affect the endings of the stories. The more obvious difference between the stories is their different settings. Abraham lived in a tent in the desert. He didn’t have to worry about anyone ruining his plans for his guests. Lot lived in an evil city, where his inhospitable neighbors would have made things miserable for his guests no matter how gracious a host he may have been.

It is the settings of the stories that determine their outcomes. If you live in the place where people are treated like dirt, it is virtually impossible to create warmth and welcome. Hospitality is not created by individuals. It is created by communities.

There is a lot of talk in the Reform Movement these days about creating congregations that exhibit “audacious hospitality.” The Union for Reform Judaism now even has a “Vice President of Audacious Hospitality.” The job description for this audaciously named position includes a mandate to foster welcoming atmospheres in Reform congregations that will warmly embrace those who have felt rejected by synagogues in the past.

This is, I think, a very worthy goal and it is exactly the kind of change that the Jewish world needs today. We need to become more welcoming to the stranger at our door. However – and I believe that the person who holds this position would agree – we will never create hospitality in the Jewish community just by appointing leaders to create that atmosphere. As this week’s Torah portion teaches us, the setting determines the outcome. You can’t have audacious hospitality in your synagogue if the synagogue is not filled with audaciously hospitable people.

Our congregation here at Temple Sinai tonight includes people who have joined us in the last year. We have set aside the Oneg this evening to meet our new members. If you are a new member of Temple Sinai, I hope you will meet some of our long-standing members. If you are a long-standing member, I hope you’ll have a chance tonight to meet some of our new members. I also hope that you’ll have conversations tonight – whether you are new or old to our congregation – about what draws you to this community. I hope you’ll hear other people talk about why they are members of this congregation.

I think you will hear stories about people who connected with the warm and sincere friendliness of this place. I think you’ll hear that – for many of our members – it is the most important reason why they came here, and why they stay here.

Hospitality is not something that is dictated from above. It cannot be created with a memo. It is about people and the way that people treat other people. It is about what we hold in our hearts.

Over the last year since I became a new member of Temple Sinai, I have found that the warm heart and caring practices of this congregation are the things I love most about it. You can’t teach that. It is an intrinsic part of what makes this congregation a genuine community.

When you walk into the doors of Temple Sinai, remember that the hospitality we show to everyone – newcomers and old-timers – is the result of the heart that each of us brings into this place. We don’t need an Abraham to stand at the door and usher people in to create a place of community. Much more than leaders, we need good townsfolk. We need to be a place where the stranger is treated as a treasure, and where no one can be a newcomer for very long. That is what I love about Temple Sinai, and it is what I hope will always be.

This is the sermon I gave tonight at Temple Sinai in Cranston, Rhode Island, for Parashat Lech-L'cha.

I have to admit that there is one common question that people use to start a conversation that always troubles me. It’s a simple question that most people seem to answer with ease, but it has always been difficult for me.

"Where are you from?"

Where am I from? Well, I was born in Norfolk, Virginia, while my father was serving in the U.S. Navy and was stationed there. I could say that I’m from Virginia, but I actually only lived there for a few months while I was an infant. I have no memory of living in Virginia during that first year of my life. I’m not really from Virginia.

I spent the next part of my life living on the East Side of Manhattan. Those were some very important years for me and I have many memories of growing up in New York City, traveling uptown and downtown on city busses, visiting my grandparents' apartment south of Central Park, going to museums and doing the things that city kids do. However, I left Manhattan when I was ten years old, so I didn’t go to high school there. I didn’t learn to drive there. I didn’t make many lifelong friends there. I did not do a lot of things that people associate with “the place where I grew up.” I’m not really from Manhattan.

Most of those teenage, identity-building experiences for me were in the suburbs. My family moved to Westchester County when I was ten and I eventually graduated from Scarsdale High School. It never really felt like home to me, though. The culture of the suburbs turned me off when I was a kid. I didn’t like the cliques and the country clubs. I was turned off by the 1970s version of preppy materialism. Even though most of my oldest friends are people I met and went to school with in the suburbs, I never really felt like I was from there.

So, where do I really feel like I am from? For most of my adult life, I have felt comfortable answering that question by saying: Here. I’m from where I am right now. I moved to Boston a year after I graduated from college and I felt right at home there in a way that I never felt about New York City. After rabbinic school, I lived for a decade in Western Massachusetts and I took to it very quickly. The town where I lived seemed like my hometown in no time.

I’ve only been in Rhode Island for just over a year now, and it, too, seems to fit me like a glove. When people ask me where I’m from, I say with hardly any hesitation, “I’m from Rhode Island.”

That’s nice. I think it is a good and comfortable thing to feel at home in the place where you live. My wife and I often say to each other, “You are my home,” and that is our deep, truest truth. "Home," as they say, "is where the heart is." That saying, to me, does not mean that you can only find your heart by going home. To me, it means that when you find your heart, you find your home.

I think it is better to be at home where you are than to always be thinking about some other place as being your "real" home, as if we always carry the shadow of our former homes around with us and long to return to them. I’ve never felt that way in life and I’m glad for it.

However, that does not eliminate the discomfort that comes when someone pushes me on the question of my place of origin and says, “No. Where are your really from? Where do you come from?”

I don’t really have a place on a map that is an answer to that question. It is not Virginia. It is not New York City. It is not Scarsdale. It certainly is not Florida, the place that I left to come to Rhode Island. (Actually, it can be hard to find anyone who is really from Florida, even in Florida.) The only answer that really makes sense inside my own head to the question, “Where are you really from?” is right here – with my family, the people I love, and the things that I care about. That is my home.

So, it is odd when I consider that this befuddlement with the question, “Where are you from?” is also a befuddlement that has followed the Jewish people from our very beginning. In this week’s Torah portion, God tells Abram (who will later be renamed “Abraham”) to leave his land, to leave his birthplace, to leave the house of his fathers and to find a new home in “a land that I will show you.”

Abram is told that the physical location from which he comes does not define him and will not define his future. He will, for the rest of his life, have to find an answer to the question, “Where are you from?” with a different place and with a different kind of answer. It is almost as if God is telling Abram, “From now on, your home is with Me. It is wherever you and I are together.” That is, in a way, a lovely way to think about home and a lovely way to think about God. But it can be a bit uncomfortable. It's a bit like not really having a place from which to be from.

This, indeed, was the predicament of the Jewish people for most of our history. We began to grow used to the idea of not having a home when we were exiles in Babylon during the 6th century B.C.E. The ancient Israelites returned to their land after the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, but the memory of being homeless stuck with us for a long time.

After the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 C.E., some six hundred years later, we were exiles again. The memory of the first exile helped us make sense of our landless existence for the next two millennia. For the many centuries in which the vast majority of the Jewish people lived outside of the land of Israel, we got used to thinking of our homeland as a faraway memory – more of a idealistic dream than a real place. We grew inured to the idea that we were a homeless people and that our homeland was something that existed in our sacred books more than it existed in on the earth.

That, of course, changed in the nineteenth century with the birth of the modern Zionist movement. Jews had always had some presence in the land of Israel, but starting in the 1880s and 1890s, large numbers of Jews started moving to Eretz Yisrael, the Land of Israel, and making it their home. They tilled the soil, drained the swamps and discovered a depth of dirt-under-the-fingernails connection with the land unknown since ancient times. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Modern Zionism, taught us that our dreams of a homeland did not have to reside only in books. “If you will it into reality,” he said, “it need not be just a dream.”

So, here we are now, sixty-seven years after the founding of the State of Israel. We can longer say, as a people, that we do not have a national hometown. Israel is that hometown, even for those of us who have never been there. When the nations of the world say to us now, “Where are you from?” the Jewish people answer proudly, we are from the land of our ancestors, the land of Israel. It is our home. It is where we are from.

But that answer sounds and feels differently coming from Jews than it would sound or feel from just about any other people. There isn't the same catch in the throat from a Frenchman who says, “I am from France,” and there is no moment of hesitation from a Bolivian who says, “I am from Bolivia.” For Jews, it is different. There is so much history, so many tears, and so many intervening centuries of separation that make us shiver a bit – even for the nativeborn Sabra – when we say, “I am from Israel.” It means something more complex and bittersweet for us, I think, than for most people.

Over the last few weeks, we have seen some desperate challenges to our claim to our own homeland. A United Nations cultural agency took up a resolution this week that claimed, essentially, that the Jewish people have no historical claim to the land of Judea ("Jew-dea"!), the land that bears our name. In the streets of Jerusalem and throughout Israel, a small number of Palestinian Arabs have picked up knives and swung them in our faces to declare that we are not really from the land that they claim. Some have killed and some of us have been killed for the audacity of living in our own home. It has been a painful few weeks to be a Jew and to affirm our home in the land of Israel – even more so than usual.

But it has never really been easy for us. Abram had to learn to be not from the place where his mother give birth to him and the place where his father taught him to shepherd sheep. It became his place because it was the place where he fell in love with God and the place where he made and loved his family with God.

We, too, diasporan Jews, have had to deal with the strange notion that our home – our real home – is someplace else. The place where our heart knows its deepest truth and where we are really from, is the land that we built, the land that we are still building, and the land that we will forever build in the land of Israel.

​Shabbat shalom.

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